thefunnel

What does field marketing do and how can field marketing create value? This is an interesting question, particularly in engineering focused companies, where there’s sometimes a lack of marketing understanding, and marketing at its best is often marginalized to entry level marcoms, like production of specification sheets, etc. So how can a marketing organization in these situations justify its existence, and achieve a higher level recognition? One way to do this is to partner with sales, because even the most engineering minded organizations needs sales to survive. This might feel like marketing is taking a sub-servant role, and in many organizations, unfortunately this is the case, but played our right this could be only a start. One way to think about the marketing value is to use the sales model concept from solution selling. In solution selling, the sales process (focus, value, relationship, intent, etc.) is generally thought as being in one of four phases or levels. Level one selling is where the relationship with the customer is casual, the focus of the efforts is the product, and the only intent is to get the customer to consider buying.  Level four selling, on the other hand, is a place where the sales person is an insider, in a symbiotic relationship with the customer and through a thorough understanding of the customers’ business can provide strategic advice, while making a sale. Similarly, marketing on level one is normally limited to lead generation, providing presentation material and general assistance, while a level four marketing is a partnership, enabling, equipping and providing sales with strategic leadership. Using a model like this can benefit marketing in many ways, but most importantly by aligning the marketing efforts to whichever level the selling is done, “sales support” can be optimized for maximum fit, which helps build the relationship with sales providing a good platform for success. In addition in knowing the maturity level of sales, marketing can help push the organization to the next level of sophistication and value, and ultimately be able to use more of its brainpower and earn the recognition it deserves.

Here’s one example how to think about measuring the success of a B-2-B web site. To start with you should first organize your metrics into different high level groups. The typical high level groups would be web acquisition, web engagement, and web conversion. The next step would be to define sub metrics for each group.  For your acquisition metrics should count and track the number of visits, unique visitors, returning visitors for different sources of referrals, such as organic search, paid search, marketing campaigns, and direct traffic. For engagement you should measure, visit depth (or page views), visit time (duration), visit returns, visits per visitor, bounce rate, exit rate, number of comments and content consumption (or form completion). In addition you must also be able to cross reference acquisition sources with the various engagements. For paid search, you might also want to drill even deeper down separating golden key words from, generic ones and the long tail words. This will enable you to scratch the surface in understanding ROI for your search investment. Finally, the web conversions also need to be divided into sub-groups. My suggestion is a four tier approach. Responses are the lowest value conversion events, where the visitor leaves a trace, but there’s no follow-up activity. Generic success events are things you want to count and put a value on. These could be certain page views (for example, example a new product), new names registered to the database, or sign-up for newsletters. The third tier is the selected few, most valuable success events. These could be contact requests, partner referrals, service requests or more valuable page views such as pricing views. And fourth are your key performance indicators such as a request for a quote or sales leads. Similar to web engagements, you should be able to trace the web conversions all the way back to the acquisition source. In addition since we’re talking about a conversion event, that normally requires a web form of some kind, you should also track completion rates or abandonment rates.

And finally you should be able to slice and dice this data based on the business segmentation (your web taxonomy). In addition you should also create a dash-board where you track the trending of all the different conversion percentages rather than the absolute numbers. If you then are also able to correlate this data to your web satisfaction data, measuring things such as overall satisfaction, would recommend, able to find, and a positive search / browsing experience, combined with how much money and effort you’re putting in, you’re much closer to understanding your real performance and business contribution of your web site.

It’s interesting how little things really change in marketing. New things comes and goes, but the fundamentals stays. Here’s some guidelines that are still highly relevant today, that I provided my team, a long time ago, when I was managing a European marketing communications team.

• Improve your communication with sales
• Know your stuff even in your sleep
• Manage the lead flow through a future looking lead map
• Be creative, do lots of testing, test new ways to communicate with your audience
• Train yourself, learn new capabilities, benchmark yourself
• Produce detailed,meaningful and relevant metrics
• Achieve your  lead forecast and budget plan, be in control